1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a document processor, an image forming apparatus, a document processing method, and a computer product, and more specifically relates to a technique used at the time of applying processing to a document input from any one of a plurality of input units.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, a multifunction product is well known, in which a plurality of functions of a printer, a copier, and a scanner is stored in one housing. In such a multifunction product, a plurality of applications referred to as a printer application, a copy application, and a scanner application is installed on a general-purpose operating system (OS) such as UNIX®, to realize a plurality of functions by switching execution processing of these applications.
However, in the printer application, the copy application, and the scanner application, since engine control, memory control, and system control are performed separately, overlapping processing occurs.
In Japanese Patent Application Laid-open (JP-A) No. 2002-084383, therefore, processing such as engine control, memory control, and system control performed respectively by the applications installed on the multifunction product is taken out from respective applications as a common processing part (platform), thereby attempting to improve the development efficiency of the application.
In JP-A No. H11-327883, print control software installed on a printer is formed of a plurality of software parts according to an object-oriented design, and print processing is performed by coordinated operation of the parts group.
However, in the invention disclosed in JP-A No. 2002-084383, the processing part that controls the hardware is made common, whereas the whole internal processing of the respective applications is not made common. Furthermore, since the internal processing is not made common and not divided into classes corresponding to the function, the development efficiency of the whole internal processing is not good. That is, in the applications on the multifunction product, to improve the development efficiency, there is still a room for improvement by making the internal processing common to all applications and dividing a characteristic function.
For example, when a user uses the multifunction product and outputs a document input from a plurality of input sources such as a FAX or a scanner from a printer, a local storage, or the FAX, since jobs included in each application such as copy and FAX realize the operation from input to output, processing is performed by a job different in each application. Hence, the processing with respect to the input document is not made common.
In the invention disclosed in JP-A No. H11-327883, the print control software is formed of a plurality of software parts according to the object-oriented design; however, software parts for controlling the flow of the processing in which the processing from input to output of the document is made common are not disclosed. Therefore, in a multifunction product having a plurality of input sources and output destinations according to a multifunctional design, even if a software part corresponding to the processing up to output of an input document is created by applying the invention disclosed in JP-A No. H11-327883, it is not easy to efficiently control the processing by making the processing over all applications common to all applications, since the user has heretofore performed processing of different jobs in each application corresponding to required processing.
Accordingly, it is an important issue as to how to realize efficiently common processing of a document by absorbing a difference of the input sources and the output destinations in the applications installed on the multifunction product. Such a problem does not occur only in the multifunction product. For example, the same problem occurs when there is a plurality of input units and a plurality of output destinations, and after processing such as “2 in 1” is performed with respect to a document input from one of the input units, the document is output from one of the output destinations.